1. Field of the Invention
Example embodiments of the present invention relate generally to an integrated circuit card system, and more particularly, to a memory card system.
2. Description of Related Art
Generally, a typical plastic card (e.g., a magnetic card) may have a magnetic strip which may not have enough capacity to store large amount of data and may be vulnerable to security. However, with the advances in semiconductor technologies, the use of integrated circuits made it possible to store large amount of data in plastic cards. For this reason, integrated circuit cards (hereinafter referred to as “IC cards”) may have been developed by combining plastic cards with integrated circuits. Because IC cards (or memory cards) may be capable of storing more data, IC cards have been widely used, such as in the banking and insurance industries.
A memory card may set a ready/busy signal to a busy state when a command is inputted from a host. When operations corresponding to the input command are all completed, the memory card may then reset the ready/busy signal to a ready state. The host may check a processing situation of the memory card using the ready/busy signal. However, a conventional memory card may encounter disadvantages.
For example, when a ready/busy signal indicates a busy state even if a processing time of a memory card exceeds a reference time (or maximum processing time of a card), the host may not determine whether the memory card continues to perform operations corresponding to a transmitted command or in an abnormal state (or stack state). The host may initialize the memory card to perform the next operation of the memory card. However, although the memory card may continue to operate that may correspond to the transmitted command, the memory card may be initialized (e.g., reset).